Dan Clowes is back with his first book in seven years: Monica - unfortunately though it’s even worse than Patience, so that makes it twelve years now since he put out a good comic (the last one being 2011’s The Death-Ray).
Monica is the woefully tedious life story of, yes, Monica who spends years searching for her missing flighty hippie mom Penny. After going through a number of stepdads, she unconvincingly becomes successful at business, joins a cult, more parental nonsense ensues, and then the book ends utterly stupidly.
Clowes touches on familiar 20th century topics - the Vietnam war, the hippie movement, cults - without saying anything about them, or even making them worth reading about. If you’ve read any story about any of these things, it’s just a rehash of the same stuff. There’s some supernatural plot elements randomly tossed in for no reason, like Monica’s dad speaking to her through the radio and that bonkers finale, but they’re neither exciting to read about or make any sense.
Clowes is an excellent cartoonist who’s made some fantastic comics - Wilson, Ghost World - but he also makes some shockingly crap ones, like the barely-readable avant-garde mess that was Velvet Glove and the aptly-named David Boring. Coincidentally, both Velvet Glove and David Boring feature dull protagonists searching for equally-dull absent parents, which is also the plot of Monica, so this is a theme Clowes repeatedly returns to and fails to make remotely interesting each time.
I’d been looking forward to Monica, as Clowes sometimes creates wonderful comics and I hoped this would be one of them, so it’s disappointing that potentially one of the year’s highlights turned out to be such a lifeless, consistently dreary read. Maybe his next book will be better - or maybe the era of good Clowes comics is long past…?
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